Parental Responsibility

I have heard a number of responses to the Ferguson incident identifying missing parental responsibility as fundamentally responsible for adolescent death both in that incident and in the Tampa episode.Aside from an unjustified indictment of black families and visible minority communities such statements lose sight of the fact that adolescence is a time of rebellion and testing of the societal boundaries. From the rowdiness of fraternities to the acting out of athletic teams,to the increase in intrafamilial strife,adolescents are pushing the new boundaries of their identities.such testing is not usually punished(if punished at all) with deadly force.It seems clear that the boundary testing of black adolescents(not exclusively male)brings into play the unacknowledged police function of “keeping certain people in place”elsewhere identified as immersification.